Hey, this is Outside In, a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I'm Nate Hedgie. It was 1989 and a young writer named Bill McKibben had walked into the studios of WBEZ in Chicago. He was there to promote his first book, which had a pretty heavy and ominous title. The end of nature and the very title itself provokes all sorts of commentary and thought, Bill McKibben is talking about the imperiled planet that we've heard of many time ago. It's Studs Turkle. He's a legendary broadcaster and the guy interviewing Bill about the end of nature. The book is in part a scientific book. It's about the greenhouse effect and the erosion of the ozone layer. This interview, it is a time capsule. Back then, climate change wasn't on the public's radar. Bill was schooling Studs about things that today would seem a little bit obvious. They even talked about a gas-powered machine that was just getting popular in the US. For the most part, the tone of this interview is friendly, but dark. Bill warned in his book that if we didn't stop burning oil and coal, then it would, quote, lead us, if not straight to hell, then straight to a place with a similar temperature. Every time you turn the ignition on your car, every time you turn up the thermostat in your house, you add more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. But there needs to be some public expression of rage and of sadness and other deep emotions at what's happening. Let's fast forward to today, nearly four decades after the end of nature. Bill was right. The planet is hotter. Climate disasters are everywhere you look. And so you might expect him to sound even more upset than ever before. But his latest book, it sounds almost optimistic. In it, he writes, for the first time, I can see a path forward, a path lit by the sun. So I asked him to chat with me. Would your family describe you as a glass half full kind of guy or a glass half empty kind of guy? I've been a glass half empty kind of guy because the science around what we're doing to the planet is so dark and dire and in many ways still am. On the other hand, now I have a glass with something in it, too. In the climate movement, there might not be anyone as prolific as Bill McKibbin. He's published a lot of books, written countless articles, and founded two climate activism organizations that are both still going strong. But how optimistic is he really that we can avert a catastrophe? I've been perky-er than usual, which is weird because in many ways, both the planet in our own country, it seems to me, are in the most dire shape they've ever been in. Today on Outside In, journalist and activist Bill McKibbin, how he's changed, how he's stayed the same, and what his story tells us about the state of the climate crisis. Stay tuned. This is Outside In, a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I'm Nate Hedgie. When I was going to grad school for environmental journalism, we were encouraged to read a ton of books, and many of them were written by Bill McKibbin. He was like the godfather of climate writing. And I remember thinking, there is no possible way I could ever be as prolific as he is. Part of Bill's success, I think, is that he got started young. If I met 28-year-old Bill McKibbin, what did he look like? What kind of guy was he? Where was he living? So I was in my 20s, I spent most of my 20s in New York City. I'd gone to work a week out of college at the New Yorker Magazine, where I wrote the talk of the town column. You got that job a week out of college. In the front of the magazine. When I was 27 years old, Bill, I was working at a burrito shop and playing in a band. How are you so motivated as a young person? Where did that come from to be like living on the streets, writing for the New Yorker, doing all this big stuff at that young of an age? Well, you know, writing was the, journalism was the thing I knew how to do. Journalism runs in Bill's blood. His dad was a newspaper man, and Bill's high school job was writing for his local paper in a town just outside of Boston, making 25 cents per column inch. When we went to Harvard, he became president of the student paper, and he covered some pretty big news stories. I mean, he interviewed then candidate Ronald Reagan as a college student. Suffice it to say, by the time I got out of college, I didn't know how to do anything else. This was the one skill that I had in the world. And it's a skill that I loved because journalism is just, as you know, is a kind of strong and strange license to just ask people things. And often they answer. Bill's first big feature writing for the New Yorker was about where everything in his apartment came from, literally. For a year, the magazine flew to all corners of the world. He went to Brazil to see where New York's oil came from. He went to the Canadian Arctic to see the kind of hydropower dams that kept his lights on. And I think that's what set me up to be taking more seriously than I might otherwise, the first emerging science around climate change. Climate change wasn't really a term yet in the mid 1980s. It was still being called the greenhouse effect, which scientists had known about since the 19th century. But they weren't able to prove that the CO2 coming out of all the world's smoke stacks and tailpipes were enough to warm the planet. At least, not until the 1980s, when scientists finally gathered enough evidence to be really sure of it. The global mean temperature has risen over the last hundred years. Four of the last seven years have been the hottest on record, and this year appears are ready to be headed to be the hottest on record. This is from a now famous Senate hearing in 1988, where a panel of scientists presented their most recent climate research. So it's reasonable to assume that the greenhouse effect is here. It's happening. The warming has begun. It started. This latest climate science came out when Bill was in his 20s. And he cites a lot of it in his book, The End of Nature, published a year after that Senate hearing. Here's the young Bill getting interviewed by Studs Turkle again. In the book you point out the beauty of nature and the awesomeness of it too. Something beyond control of man, but man deals with and lives with. He's saying now, man, we, arrogant we, the human species, but almost control nature and thus destroy it. The idea that there are forces like the weather in particular that operate outside our control or untouched by us seems to me to be eroding away. The central idea in his book was that nature was no longer independent from human activity. His argument was that we'd entered a period of Earth's history in which human-driven, global warming has now changed everything about the planet. Basically, he was talking about the Anthropocene way before the term Anthropocene was even popularized. Over the next two decades, he pumped out more climate-tinged books about living light, having just one kid, buying less at Christmas. But Bill wasn't seeing the sort of big societal change he thought was needed. You know, my theory of change was people will read my book and then they will change. In fact, lots of people read it. It came out in 24 languages, I think. But it turns out that's not really how the world works. It just started becoming clear to me that we had won the argument. We were just losing the fight because the fight, turns out, wasn't really about data and reason and evidence. It was about money and power, which is what most fights are about. And the fossil fuel industry had so much money and hence so much political power that they could lose the argument, but their business model chugged merrily on ahead. Bill's work had always straddled the line between journalism and activism. His stories in the New York Times, for instance, were often in the opinion section. He wasn't keeping his fears and anxieties about climate change close to his vest. But at some point, something bigger shifted inside him. What was the moment for you when you realized that journalism, documenting, just documenting what was happening, wasn't enough for you? One of the events, I think, that brought this home in stark relief for me was taking a trip to Bangladesh. Bill was in Bangladesh for a reporting trip in the 2000s, when there was an outbreak of dengue fever, a deadly disease spread by mosquitoes that's becoming way more common in the warmer, wetter world created by climate change. Bill got bit when he was there and he got really sick. And I remember being in the big central clinic as I converted armory. Thousands and thousands of people on cots just shivering. And in between shivering, I remember thinking mostly, how unfair is this? I mean, there are 180 million people in Bangladesh, but they're a rounding error, literally, in the total carbon emissions of planet Earth. Whereas the 4% of us who live in the US, we've produced about 25% of all the carbon that's up in the atmosphere, heating the planet. The fundamental unfairness of it struck me in the profound way. So combined with that insight about argument versus fight, I think I sort of knew at some level that it was time to start figuring out, despite my own personality, which is introverted, how to start building power of our own. After a quick break, the introverted Bill McKibbin fights back. Plus, why he's got a spring this step now. And whether he thinks the worst of the climate crisis can still be averted or not, we'll be right back. So I started playing music again. I actually just played this folk festival recently. 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We have been getting the most random submissions lately. Like can bobcats get hairballs? Or why does warm dirt smell so good? But we need more questions, so please send us the weirdest, wackiest questions about science and the natural world that you can think of. It is super easy. You can call our hotline at 1-844-GO-AUTER or even better, send us a voice memo to outsideinradioatnhpr.org. Okay, back to the show. Hey, this is Outside In, a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I'm Nate Hedgie. And today we've been talking to the prolific writer and thinker Bill McKibbin. Now, if Bill's first act was as a climate journalist, his second act was as a climate activist. Bill, welcome to Democracy Now. Explain why you were arrested. Well, we really felt like this was the issue, Amy. Back in 2008, Bill founded 350.org. It's a grassroots campaign against fossil fuels. And he wasn't on the sidelines writing op-eds. He was arrested for protesting the Keystone Pipeline. He was arrested for protesting Exxon. And he talked about it on shows like Democracy Now. We got to get off oil. And so there are people flooding into D.C. from all 50 states in Puerto Rico, lining up to get arrested over the next couple of weeks. These are the kinds of actions and words that could get a newspaper reporter or maybe even a public radio podcast host fired. Because as journalists, we are taught to be objective, to check our biases. So I wanted to know if these two sides of Bill ever came into conflict. What is the line between activism and journalism for you? And do you worry that your activism ever compromises your journalism? Well, I was a sports writer, as I say in my youth. And the code of sports writers is you're not supposed to root for the team that you're covering. Yeah. You know? No cheering in the press box, as they say. And I do root for the team that's trying to save the earth, not the team that's trying to wreck it. So my biases are clear. I do not want the planet to overheat. And if that makes me, you know, not a journalist, then so be it. These days, Bill is enthusiastically cheering for Team Solar. Because lately they've been having some big wins. This is the subject of his latest book. Here comes the sun. Bill points out that in just the past decade, the cost of building solar panels has fallen by 90%. And the song that he's been singing since the 1980s, it's changing a little bit. Fewer, dour, minor chords, more happy major chords. Now we live in a world where the economic force of gravity works in favor of clean energy. We live on a planet where the cheapest way to make power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. The book is full of surprisingly upbeat anecdotes. Australia built a lot of renewable energy. Going on 40% of houses have solar panels on the roof. Here's another one. In Pakistan, people have been watching TikTok explainer videos to build solar panels on their roofs, in their fields. And they've built enough solar to completely offset demand on the electric grid for parts of the day. And in China, they're installing nearly a gigawatt of solar every day. That's the equivalent of an entire coal-fired power plant every day. And in Europe, people are buying plug-in solar panels from their local stores and then setting them up on their balconies. And that's becoming a thing here in the US, where in Utah, they just passed a law allowing it. The state senator who introduced it, Republican, said, why should the people of Provo be denied something that the people of Stuttgart enjoy? And no one had an answer. So now they're not. And you can go on YouTube and watch lots of earnest Utahns hanging up their balcony solar system. There you have it. The easiest solar installation I have ever done. I, for one, am a huge fan of Utah's new law. Hopefully someday the rest of the states can enjoy what we're enjoying right now with the people of Stuttgart. And that's all in the present. Bill's vision for the future is also pretty dang hopeful. He sees a world powered entirely by renewables. And if that happened, not only would the global temperature stabilize, but he thinks it would solve other big problems too. For instance, he says we'd stop losing the roughly 8 million people a year who die from breathing in polluted air. Global politics would change. Right now, we depend on fuel that's only available in a few places. So the people who control those places have extraordinary wealth and power, which they routinely misuse. I mean, president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, biggest oil baron in Europe, has used his winnings to launch a land war on that continent in the 21st century. It's really nice to imagine a planet where people are able to control this most important of resources themselves, where they rely on sun and wind that are available everywhere to everyone. Think about how the geopolitics of our planet would have been different over the last century if oil had been of relatively trivial value in that period. Bill doesn't think that this solar powered world is far off. Even without activism or government incentives, but by sheer economic forces alone, he thinks it's inevitable that the world will eventually run completely on renewables. That's pretty glass half full, right? Your new book, Here Comes the Sun, arguably a lot more hopeful than your earlier work. You write that, for the first time, I can see a path forward, a path lit by the sun. What changed for you? So, I mean, let's be clear, the optimism is very tempered by the fact that we're now very late in this game, that the predictions that I made almost 40 years ago have now come true. I don't want to make Bill out to sound like he's totally turned the climate corner. The truth is, despite his optimism on solar, Bill does have a tendency to steer the conversation towards all the bad things he sees around him. Glaciers are melting. The Trump administration is trying to stamp out sun and wind. Literally five feet of rain fell in 24 hours. We're in extraordinary trouble. It made me wonder if this shift towards an optimistic future isn't actually a Bill shift, but more like a writing trick, giving his readers something to grab onto. After all, people respond to doom and gloom stories, yeah, but they also want some hope. Regardless, there is one big talking point that Bill is definitely handling differently than he used to. So, in the 90s, you wrote a lot about restraining ourselves, right? Yep. Buying less Christmas gifts, maybe only have one kid. I actually want to play you a clip from a 1989 interview you did with Studs Turkle, where you talk about restraining ourselves. Go over it. I guess what I'm talking about when I say humility is learning to restrain ourselves. It would mean holding ourselves back a little bit from constant progress. And this new book, though, you make an argument that we should focus less on lifestyle choices and more on swapping oil, fossil fuels for wind and solar. You write, quote, emergency room doctors don't waste a lot of time worrying about their patients' poor lifestyle choices. They do what they must to save their lives. What's changed for you? Well, I mean, what changed is that we didn't, I mean, A, we didn't win that argument. We didn't hold ourselves back at all. And so now the temperature is hotter than it was when I was talking with Studs. And so, you know, I wish we had, but we didn't. So now we're in a new reality. I think a hundred years from now, humans will have figured out more interesting ways to live our lives. My guess is that we'll concentrate more on human connection and on connection with whatever is left of the natural world, because I think that's really what we were designed for. But I don't think that's going to happen in the next five years in time to meet the deadlines that physics is now imposing on us for dealing with climate change. So I think we better figure out the way to make ourselves smaller by using technologies that don't produce as much damage as the ones we're using now. How did you feel hearing your voice in that Studs-Turkle interview? I brought back such good memories for me because Studs-Turkle, he'd been a great hero of mine. I felt so honored as a 28-year-old to be in his company. And I was struck by the fact that very little has changed for me. I've spent my whole life on this same project. Some days I resent that. Why do you resent that? I mean, I had lots and lots and lots of other things I would have liked to have written about in my life, you know? And I could have. I was a New Yorker staff writer. I could have spent my life writing about fascinating stuff. This has been fascinating and I don't really resent it. It's been a way to think about the world in deep ways. But I also just makes me sad at my own failure to figure out how to, you know, how to prevent the change that I was early to see coming. There was a long period in there when I felt like you feel when you have a nightmare and you can see a big monster coming at you, but you can't get anybody else to see it. So I wish I'd been better at what I was doing. And I certainly could have figured out sooner that it was going to take more than writing that we I should have been organizing from the start. Bill is getting older. His voice is a little lower than it used to be. But whereas you can imagine someone else becoming jaded or I guess more jaded, Bill is picking up steam. A few years ago, he founded the Environmental Organization Third Act. It's all about motivating his fellow boomers to take action on climate change. So you've been battling this monster for 30 plus years. You know, you're in your 60s now. What does your third act look like? Well, my third act at the moment looks largely like organizing third act. This organization that we started three years ago for people over the age of 60, we've now got about 100,000 people nationwide. It turns out that it was one of the better ideas of my life. Older people are there's a lot of us were politically powerful because we all vote. There's no known way to stop old people from voting. We have lots of connections and skills acquired over a lifetime and a lot of time. And so it's been some of the most rewarding organizing I've ever done. But I'm proud of the work we've done. My interview with Bill McKibbin was recorded late last year. And a few months before it, President Trump had deployed members of the National Guard to Washington, D.C. One of his advisors, Stephen Miller, was giving a sort of pep talk to the troops. But he said, the one problem we're having is all these elderly hippies who keep coming out and screaming at us and they should just go home and take a nap. And we took that we almost had a holiday at third act. We were so pleased to hear his, you know, because that's us, man. And we're not going to go home and take a nap. We're going to do what we can to defend the planet that we were born onto and to defend the democracy that we were born into. And God knows if we'll succeed or not, but we're going to try. What advice would you give that end of nature version of yourself, that 28 year old version of yourself? Only to figure out more quickly that it's not just an argument, it's a fight. That is it for today's episode. And we would love to hear from you, our listeners. How are you feeling about the climate crisis these days? Are you glass half full? Are you glass half empty? And how have those feelings changed over the years? Shoot us an email at outsideinatnhpr.org, or you can hit us up on social media. We're at outside in radio, or you can give us a call and leave a voicemail. Our number is 1-844-GOAUTER. This episode was reported, produced and mixed by Felix Poon. It was edited by our executive producer, Taylor Quimby. I'm your host, Nate Hedgie. Our team also includes Justine Paradis, Marina Henke, and Jessica Hunt. Rebecca LaVoy is director of On Demand Audio. Music in this episode was by Blue Dot Sessions, Roy Edwin Williams, and Walt Adams. Outside In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio. You get your blower to rake the leaves mean nothing. That's right. Whereas the man and the rake and the leaf were in a sort of communion for one of a better word. Whereas now it's nothing. That's right. Have you ever asked yourself, can the president really do that? Or wondered if there is too much money in political campaigns? Then check out the new season of You Might Be Right, hosted by us, former Tennessee governor Phil Bredesen and Bill Haslam. We're back for a brand new season now and You Might Be Right cements the idea that constructive disagreement can lead to real problem solved. This season we're going to dig into the role of the National Guard, AI regulation, and a lot more. New episodes drop every other week. Follow You Might Be Right wherever you get your podcasts. We all need advice, but it's not always clear who to ask, even in 2026. Enter how to. The long standing advice show and ambi award nominated best personal growth podcast that's back with new episodes and a new host who me, Mike Peska, each week I tackle a listener question ranging from travel to finance to relationships and beyond with help from a world class expert, you know, someone who actually very much knows what they're talking about. 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